Impartiality: The Secret of Success

Iran 6 6 10 22 India 5 9 23 37 Philippines 4 5 9 18 Thailand 3 10 13 26 Pakistan 2 3 4 9 So, between them, China, Korea and Japan bagged the lion’s share of the total medals. India is a far bigger and more populous country than South Korea, yet this chart shows that India lagged very far behind Korea. Commenting on this, The Indian Express of October 6, 1986, writes: “The Koreans used a computer to select their athletes and spent one million dollars to train them for each discipline for two years. India used familiar hit-or-miss methods in which the old malady of parochialism and nepotism may not have been at a total discount.” To cut a long story short, the Koreans selected their competitors on the basis of talent, whereas India chose well-connected people. How different could the outcome have been if India had done as Korea did and had fed the necessary data about the potential participants into a computer and allowed the selection to be made with the total disinterestedness and mechanical impartiality that only a computer is capable of? This shows that impartiality is the secret of success, while parochialism and nepotism is an old malady.